TTIP Off

Of course, everyone always knew this.

UKIP was in favour of TTIP the last time that anyone checked. Mind you, it is shedding commitments such as NHS privatisation and the flat tax as enthusiastically as it has signed up a book-length advocate of them in the hope of making him the first MP to be elected under its banner.

But UKIP is currently without a Commons seat, or at least a Commons seat the occupant of which turns up. Its pro-TTIP arguments would, however, be endorsed by a certain number of Conservative MPs. How many, one wonders?

Do they really share so completely the neoliberal, Atlanticist, Anglospherist, globalist dream, with its inherent horror of socialised medicine, that they would vote for massive increases in the powers of the European Commission and of the European Courts?

A free trade agreement between the US and the EU, of which this has always been the only possible kind, has long been Liberal Democrat policy. Is the Radical wing, or a certain vaguely but increasingly Eurosceptical Right which does exit, even aware of that?

(Privatising the Royal Mail was also a Lib Dem, though not a Conservative, manifesto commitment in 2010. On this, Vince Cable has been nothing if not true to his word.)

A free trade agreement between the US and the EU also ties in rather well with the neoliberalism of the SNP. Dare that party's MPs vote for it and against the NHS? Plaid Cymru, a very different beast, would most definitely not do so.

The British model that is the NHS differentiates this country both from Continental Europe and from the United States. It is a hugely important standing contradiction of the theory of the Anglosphere, the proponents of which hate it with a psychotic passion.

Labour has the opportunity to present itself, entirely accurately, as the party of social democratic patriotism against all comers; of One Nation, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation.

It can do so by demanding, and by using every procedural device to bring about before the recess for the party conference season and thus also before the Scottish independence referendum, a Commons division on a motion plainly and simply rejecting any "Transatlantic" "Trade and Investment" "Partnership" out of hand as a matter of principle.

Plaid Cymru, the SDLP, the DUP, Caroline Lucas, Naomi Long, Sylvia Hermon and George Galloway would all vote for it. All eyes would be on the Lib Dem backbenches, on the SNP, and on those sections of the Conservative Party ostensibly most committed to things like the NHS, or to national and parliamentary sovereignty, or, and this is not quite unheard of, to both.

Ed Miliband, over to you.